-The Telegraph The Manmohan Singh government has decided to aggressively highlight the Supreme Court’s opinion on allocation of natural resources to debunk the CAG’s coal report that presumed losses of Rs 1.86 lakh crore. Although the government had given a restrained formal response yesterday, senior ministers P. Chidambaram, Salman Khurshid and Kapil Sibal were fielded again today. The ministers carefully avoided attacking the CAG directly but the essence of their argument was that...

-The Telegraph Consensus eluded a meeting of the group of ministers (GoM) on the land acquisition bill today amid divergent views on the applicability of the proposed law to mining and coal exploration and a retrospective clause for ongoing projects. The panel will meet again in the first week of October. The revised Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill is expected to be reintroduced in the winter session. The original bill had a...

-The Times of India The government on Thursday seized upon Supreme Court's ruling that auctions are not mandatory for allocating natural resources as a validation of its stand against the comptroller and auditor general's (CAG) findings in the 2G spectrum and Coalgate cases. Talking to media after the verdict, telecom minister Kapil Sibal and law minister Salman Khurshid welcomed the judgment, suggesting it had vindicated the government's position. Sibal said all constitutional authorities...

-The Hindustan Times The bureaucracy is determined to make you pay for your right to information (RTI), literally. Documents released under the transparency law reveal that the government has been planning to make people pay to file appeals since 2009. So far, RTI applicants only have to pay a fee of Rs. 10 for filing applications. If the information request is denied, they are entitled to appeal against the decision, initially to the...

-Frontline Members of denotified, nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes, treated as criminal tribes by the colonial rulers, have no place to call their own and no land, no rights, and no support from the government.  Emaciated, eyes sunken deep into sockets, skin hanging loose, almost gasping for breath, Indro Devi and Sarvnath, a couple in their eighties, lie on polythene sheets in an 8×10 square-foot tent made of rags, by a stinking nullah...